


don't, don't leave my embrace

by serendipityinwords



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: (it isn't actually i havent seen the past two episodes), 512 spec, Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, PHEW THIS IS REALLY ANGSTY LIKE IM NOT KIDDING IT'S VERY ANGSTY, mentions of becho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-22
Updated: 2018-07-22
Packaged: 2019-06-14 14:15:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15390552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serendipityinwords/pseuds/serendipityinwords
Summary: Clarke tries to have a conversation with Bellamy. The problem is, she's about six years too late.





	don't, don't leave my embrace

**Author's Note:**

> This might be the angstiest thing I've ever written but it was also extremely cathartic, so. Blame the show. 
> 
> (Also, please ignore it if some things don't line up with canon. I haven't been keeping up, which is more than understandable, tbh.)

Clarke hasn’t spoken to Bellamy since he’d found his way back to Shallow Valley. It was enough tolerating the pointed looks she’d been getting from Madi, the icy silence she’d received from Monty and Harper when they had arrived with him, and her own guilt-addled mind. She doesn’t need to meet Bellamy’s eyes and see the betrayal or hurt— or worse— understanding, in them. There’s also the fact that she’s still mind-numbing angry with him. For more than one reason.

It isn’t exactly difficult avoiding him. There’s so much to do around camp, now that they’ve become Diyoza’s most valued informants. She’s always flitting around camp trying to piece together everything she already knows and everything she’s learning, to come up with a cohesive strategy. Diyoza’s orders to keep everything under wraps until the tensions between both factions in Eligius have eased has everyone on edge too. It’s for the best. She doesn’t know what she’d do if she had time freed up to think about Bellamy.

Plus, it’s not like Bellamy’s jumping at every chance to talk to her. It hurts more than she can make sense of.

She’s always aware of him, though. She feels his presence when he’s in the same room with her, looking pointedly away so that she knows he feels her there too. When he’s somewhere else, she knows exactly where he is and does everything she can to avoid it. When she doesn’t feel particularly strong (which was more often than she cares to admit), she does everything she can to be near him. Never with him, but close enough to feel like she’s doing something dangerous and just getting away with it.

From the quick glances she could bear sparing, Bellamy’s frame is always tout with tension. And it’s not like she has her eyes on him all the time, but she’s instinctively sure that he hasn’t relaxed in all the time he’s been there.

She knows he did something to delay Octavia and her cult from getting here, but she doesn’t know the details. She doesn’t know who to ask. But if Bellamy’s demeanor is anything to go by, it’s not something he’ll ever be able to come back from. If it’s worse than what he did to Octavia for her, she can’t imagine what he’s going through. For her own sanity, she doesn’t try.

She aches to reach out and touch him. Sometimes, that’s all she can feel. She misses him more than she missed him when he was gone. She misses someone who’s right in front of her. 

Clarke had thought that if the first few months of being stuck on the ground alone couldn’t drive her insane, nothing could. She’s starting to wonder if this is going to do it. If loving someone as futilely as she does, knowing that their relationship is unfixable, will finally drive her off the deep end. She would laugh if she didn’t know that it’ll make her cry. But, it’s just a few more days. In a few days, they’d have fought the war and emerged victorious, or they’d be dead. And if they survived...

She never lets herself finish the thought.

For all her tip-toeing around him and all the clever ways she thought to avoid him, she doesn’t actually think of what she would say if he does manage to find her regardless. Her plans have never ventured further than spinning on her heels and brisk-walking in the opposite direction. So, when she physically slams into him when neither of them were paying attention and he steadies her with a heavy hand on her hip, she doesn’t breathe for what feels like years.

Her shirt has ridden up a little and her skin burns where his hand touches her. She almost hisses at the contact. The fact that it’s as calloused as she remembers sends her reeling just a little. Something about him is the same, even if it feels like everything else has changed. She slowly works her gaze up to his face, bracing herself for the full impact of his eyes on her. She never did get used to it. Even six years ago, when it was a near-constant thing, she was never used to it. But when she looks at him, he isn’t looking back at her. He’s staring at her own hand, clutching his shoulders tightly. She hadn’t even realized she was doing it. She lets go abruptly, feeling light-headed all of a sudden. He pulls away just as quick. For some reason, it irritates her.

He casts a cursory glance at her before turning on his heels and walking away. She stares at his retreating back, feeling extremely hot and cold at the same time. The sadness in her chest that had subsided into a dull ache after so long hits her full-on. She almost flinches at the sharpness of it, the urgency of it. It’s the way he’d looked at her, she thinks. She recalls all the ways he’s looked at her all of a sudden. He’s looked at her in annoyance, in awe, in derision, in pain, in fury, in relief, in betrayal, in unfathomable sadness, in love, always in love. But never like this. Never indifferent. Never distant.

She had thought she had made peace with living a life without Bellamy. Even when she had hope, she was still practical. She had always been prepared for the possibility that he would never come back to her. And for a brief moment, she thought she could live with the fact that whatever they used to have would be gone forever. Lost, untraceable, gone.

She was an idiot.

Because this is grief. This is the kind of sadness that breaks you. She stares at the back of his head. It’s a sight she’s used to seeing. But this feels different. Like if she doesn’t speak up now, it’s all she’ll see of him again.

“You’re seriously never going to speak to me again?” she asks, grimacing at her voice booming through the empty room. She hears the hysteric edge in her voice but doesn’t care to reign it in.

He freezes. She’s transfixed as she watches his hands clench by his sides. “You seemed okay with it,” he replies, voice flat, head turning a little so she can see his profile, “When you left me to die.”

And maybe he has all the right in the world to say that, but she still wishes he hadn’t. Suddenly, all she wants to do is run. But beyond that, there’s that part of her that’s only rage, itching to speak up. “And you’ve been okay with it for a lot longer.”

He exhales sharply, as if he’d been slapped.  _Good_ , she thinks meanly. He turns around to face her, his face lined with anger. There’s tension in his jaw and a tic in his cheek, his eyes blazing something fierce. Clarke is already rearing for a fight. She finds that she has been since he crossed a desert and kissed a girl that wasn’t her. She had never let herself acknowledge that fact, but, she figures she’s so far gone anyway. She might as well start being honest with herself.

“Did you want me to mourn you for six years?” he growls. Despite it all, she deflates at that. Of course, she didn’t. Of course, she wanted him to move on. Of course, the idea of Bellamy being sad for any reason at all makes her stomach twist up. Of course not. She wants to answer him, but the words get caught in her throat and, she realizes, he isn’t done speaking yet. “Because I did. And I still am.”

She freezes. Her heart is hammering against her chest. She swears the sound echoes around the room. “I’m right here.” Her voice sounds broken to her own ears. She thinks she’s crying but she’s too mortified to make sure.

“Are you?” His voice is still thick with fury. “Because I don’t think I know who you are anymore.”

It’s a strange feeling. Fury and grief and disappointment and so many other things mingling in her chest, staining all her words. “And you’re so recognizable?” She scoffs. She can’t stop, doesn’t want to. “Manipulating an innocent child to do your dirty work.”

He stalks across the room to reach her, taking giant steps each time. He’s so close now, their boots touch. Neither one moves away. She makes sure her face is as hard as it’s ever been when she tilts her head back to stare at him. She catches him eyeing her lips before meeting her gaze. She’s just bitter enough to take satisfaction in it.

“You’ve never been a stranger to manipulating the innocent yourself, Clarke.” he says, voice low, anger clipping every word.

She snarls at him, refusing to let the hurt show. “If I manipulated, if I killed, I did it to protect our people.”

“And I did it to protect mine!” he yells but there’s an undercurrent of urgency. There’s something he wants her to understand. But all Clarke really registers is the tidal wave of pain pulling her under the surface, choking her.

His people. Not theirs anymore. His. She lets the realization sink in. Really sink in, like it hadn’t for the past couple of weeks. It’s never going to be them together, for all they’ve promised the same. They’re separate entities, parallel lines. They had always been going the same direction. Clarke had just always assumed that they would meet someday. She had been a fool. She took it for granted. She never admitted it to herself in so many words, but she thought that when he came back to her, he would love her immediately. They would pick up where they left off. This time, she wouldn’t be so scared. This time she’d be ready. She didn’t think that he would have to learn to unlove her. She didn’t think he would learn to love someone else. She didn’t think.

And if he finally found the happiness she couldn’t provide him, well, Clarke could hardly begrudge him for that. And just like that, she feels all the anger she’s felt since she’d found him again fade away. It’s replaced with the kind of exhaustion she recognizes comes after grief. She wants to lie down. She wants to take a break from his beseeching gaze, begging her to see something she doesn’t have the strength to. She wants to go back six years and tell him that she loved him when she had the chance, right then and there, as the world ended around them. She wants. 

She used to picture herself as a part of some far-off constellation. This was some weeks after they left her there, when she was delirious from the lack of sleep, food and Bellamy. She thought she could become a part of something greater than herself. She thought she’d be so far up, she’d be able to see the past, present and future. And she’d finally be past all the grief and guilt for the things she’d done and the people she lost. She’d watch Bellamy build himself a home in the stars and she’d be happy for him.

She wants that now. She doesn’t want to feel all of this. She wants to skip right to the part where she’s happy for him. Instead, she’s experiencing the loss of six years of built-up hope, all at once.

She takes a step back. And then another. And then another. Bellamy reaches out uselessly. His hand grasps at the empty air. He doesn’t make a move to go after her, though. He looks like what she imagines she might look like. Clarke vaguely wonders if he feels the same thing. After all, he had loved her on the ground. She didn’t doubt that. And maybe he loved her now. But it wasn’t the same. It can’t ever be the same.

“Understood,” she says, and she does. She just doesn’t want to.

“Clarke,” he starts. She waits for a few seconds, but he only lets her name hang in the air between them. His face crumples a bit like he’s contemplating the cost of crying in front of her. Old Bellamy wouldn’t have needed to think about it. 

She’d need to separate them in her head if she wants to be able to get through this. If she imagined that there was a version of her and a version of him that could have been happy together, she’d feel much better about this whole thing.

She nods again, though what she feels like doing is crying. He fixes his gaze on the ground and she looks somewhere beyond him.

They’re back at where they started. But that’s not exactly right. They’re further from each other than they’ve ever been.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm rubysvida on tumblr!


End file.
